A tale of two technologies talk at autodesk 5-13

A Tale of Two Missions: User Research, Design and

Technology

Jay TrimbleNASA Ames Research Center

Autodesk 5-13

Wednesday, May 22, 13

User Research

Design

Technology


NASA


A Tale of Two User Technology Missions

• Mars Exploration Rovers, landed in 2004, 90-day estimated mission life, one rover still operational in 2013

• Mission Control Technologies


Mars Exploration Rovers

• Science Objectives

• Determine the aqueous, climatic and geologic history of a site on Mars where conditions may have been favorable to the preservation of evidence of pre-biotic or biotic processes


Operations


Human Centered Computing for MER

• We, a division from NASA Ames, proposed to work with the JPL mission team

• Our proposal was methods, not tools

• A comprehensive look at work practice using ethnography


Justification

• Increase productivity during surface ops phase

• Nominal 90-day mission

• Daily surface productivity limitations of a robotic surrogate

• Mitigate operational error risk


Observations

• Interviews and observations

• Observations were key

• Observations often reveal vast discrepancies between what people say they do and what people actually do - Don Norman

• Difficult to observe processes that don’t exist yet


What we saw

• Science field test, roughly 2 years before launch


FIDO Field Test 2001


Planning


IBM Blueboard + FIDO = MERBoard

+ =


MERBoard


MERBoard Platform

• Hardware

• Flat screen display (new at the time) with touchscreen overlay

• Software

• Written in Java

• Provided a large touch screen interaction display with whiteboard, storage space, screen capture, Screen sharing (VNC)


General Tools

• Whiteboard

• VNC

• Browser

• Personal Storage Space


MERBoard Whiteboard

Present, Save, retrieve, ubiquitous access, owners,

versions


MERSpace Design--Personal data in a collaborative space--A consistent model for storing and retrieving data


Remote AccessView, control, capture, save

-Board to Board-PC to Board


Whiteboard Use in Surface Ops

Write, broadcast, present, save, recall


Specific Tool

• Sol Tree Plug-in


Creating Sol Trees


Presenting Sol Trees


Personal tools• Initial MER observations suggest that

scientists default to their own tools

• Use mission tools when they fill a desired niche, or when required, future mission systems will benefit from interoperability


Research to Product

• Sol Trees - a clear need and a successful product

• MERBoard - a general solution to a broad set of issues and an attempt to do something new - mixed results


A Lesson Learned

• What do MERBoard and a computer for the kitchen have in common?


MCT

• A technology approach to a problem class

• Inspired by personal experience, Open Doc, OS/2 and a particular question about interoperability from a MER user


Inspirations

• Opendoc

• Star

• “The Xerox Star...it was brilliantly designed...had ease of use features and a philosophy that has not been equaled since. Many of the developers of systems in the marketplace today would do well to study the Star.” --Don Norman, 1998


The Problem

• Applications are walled off worlds

• Users become integrators

• Duplicated functionality


Our Solution

• Mission Control Technologies

• It’s open source, give it a try

• https://github.com/nasa/mct

• https://sites.google.com/site/openmct/home


https://github.com/nasa/mct


https://sites.google.com/site/openmct/home




Applications

Different Interactions Duplication


Granularity

Medium Granularity

Fine Granularity

Large Granularity Components


User Objects

• All in one integrated environment

• Consistent interactions

• Model their real world domain counterparts

• The same thing in many views


Putting it all together• Everything in one

environment

• Everything is an object with consistent behavior

• Objects may be groups into collections

• Collections are user-objects


The Same Thing, Many ViewsAlpha View

Plot View

Info View


Notebook Views

• This notebook is a user-object, with embedded text and telemetry objects

• The same thing is shown in two views - notebook and


Multi-Domain Composition


A Real World Example - Data Association

• Current software

• Place a widget on the screen.

• Associate a parameter with it, repeat and re-check over and over for reuse or different views

• MCT

• Associate a parameter with a user object once

• Reuse as often as needed, share, change view live in place


Legacy MCT

Steps 20 8Manual data entries 5 1External tools used 1 0

Operator efficiency - Building Displays

Build

Test

Build

Test

Process stepsWhat actions does it take to build and

test a display?

Process timeHow long does it take to accomplish those

steps?

Legacy MCTMinutes to complete 65 6

90% reduction in time

60% reduction in steps

80% reduction in manual entryManual data entry is the primary source of errors / risk


http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/02/Analogue_clock_face.svg


























An Icon

• A purely technical approach to change will fail


9

Participatory Design

Observe

Prototype

Design Together


Participatory Design• We built a unified team across organizations

• Users felt ownership of the design

• User who were not part of the PD process did not feel a sense of ownership

• User expectations conveyed through hype and other unofficial means of communications did not match the reality of the product


Agile + PD

User Feedback

3 Weeks Iteration n

Daily iteration nBuild to Customer

TestFeature mods/additions,bug fixes

Optional Mid-Iteration Hackathon tests bigfeatures

Pre-ShipHackathon

Priorities/JIRARankings

Nightly Build/Internal testing as features roll out

Coding

Issue Tracking Updates/Priorities/RankingsUE & Tech Spec dates driven by coding dependencies

Deliver to customer

Agile Development Iteration

Code Freeze (-3 days)

Feature Freeze(-7 days)

Customer triages issues it discovered

Customer acceptance test

Customer verification of closed JIRA issues

Customer installsiteration n-1

Optionally, hot patch

Iteration n+1

Start 24 hour test (-2 day)


User project their wishes onto software they have not seen yet

• You must fill in the blank

• How you fill in it, and the level of fidelity, affects stakeholder perceptions


Communications


First use can be a shock


Results: Bad

• The tightly integrated developer/customer team exacerbated a pre-existing polarization that pitted those who wanted new software “against” those who did not.

• Our deploy early and often model was incompatible with the broader user groups mental model of users not seeing the software until the final product.


Results:Good

• Through participatory design and agile development we built a unified team composed of the designers, developers and users.

• A user object model in which objects behave as consistent representations of their real world domain object counterparts - these are not widgets

• We built a modular user-composable software architecture


Try It

• https://github.com/nasa/mct

• https://sites.google.com/site/openmct/home






A tale of two technologies talk at autodesk 5-13

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